January 13, 2017

MacStories Weekly: Issue 62

In this issue: We start 2017 off with GIF Toaster, Wikipedia apps, email workflows, member requests and questions, a bunch of app debuts, James Thomson’s Home screen, and, of course, stickers.

MACSTORIES RECOMMENDS

Great apps, accessories, gear, and media recommended by the MacStories team.

GIF Toaster

Working with GIFs can be tricky. If you encode at a resolution that’s too high, the file will be huge, which is no good if you want to attach it to a tweet or post it on a website. The best way I’ve found to deal with this on iOS when I need to create a GIF or edit an existing one is to use GIF Toaster. It’s the Swiss Army knife of GIF utilities.

The range of tools at your fingertips in GIF Toaster is impressive. On my Mac, I use GIF Brewery, which can make the fans scream when it’s encoding a GIF. That this can even be done on a mobile device is a testament to just how far the iPhone and iPad have come.

GIFs can be created with GIF Toaster using videos, photos, burst photos, Live Photos, time lapse movies, panoramic photos, or other GIFs. The first step is to pick the type of file you want to convert. For instance, if you pick videos, GIF Toaster will show a gallery of the videos in the Photos app. Tapping on any of the videos opens the conversion interface. The first place I look is in the file information section to get a sense of the file size, frame rate, and resolution before deciding which settings to use.

Below the information section is a long list of settings that can be tweaked to get exactly what you want. You can adjust the start and stop points of the clip, the playback speed, the frames per second, the dimensions, effects, and more. Of those settings, the two I use most often are the resolution and frames per second options, which have the biggest impact on the size of the GIF.

GIF Toaster lets you just as easily invoke the reverse process turning a GIF into a video, photo, Live Photo, or still image GIFs. This isn’t something I have done more than a couple of time, but it’s a good option to have. GIF Toaster also includes a GIF viewer. From the gallery of GIFs stored on your iPhone, you can speed up or slow down playback of a GIF, select individual frames to share, copy the GIF to an album within GIF Toaster, or open it in another app.

GIF Toaster is free, but there is a $1.99 In-App Purchase that adds additional flexibility to adjust the settings of your GIFs and removes ads.

MACSTORIES COLLECTIONS

Wikipedia Apps, Vol. 1

Wikipedia

Wikipedia’s official iOS app got a big update in 2016 that brought me back to it for the first time in a while. The focus of the app is discovery. Wikipedia opens in the Explore tab that includes suggested articles based on your past searches, featured articles, popular articles, a picture of the day, and articles based on your location. If you highlight text in an article, the popup menu includes a ‘share-a-fact’ action for sharing a snippet of the article using the share sheet. There are much more specialized Wikipedia implementations on iOS, but the official Wikipedia app is a great place to start if your research would benefit from free-form browsing of related topics. You can read our full review here.


Qwiki

Qwiki, which I reviewed last year, is a Mac menu bar app for searching and browsing Wikipedia. Clicking the app’s menu bar icon opens a search box. As you type a search term, Qwiki live-updates the results list in a popup window that extends down from the menu bar. Select a result and you can read through the Wikipedia entry. There is a row of buttons below the page you are browsing that let you navigate the page, return to the search page, copy a link in one of three formats (plain, Markdown, and HTML), open the page in your browser or share a link to the entry with the system share sheet. The same functions can be accessed from the Touch Bar if you have a compatible MacBook Pro.


V for Wiki

It’s not surprising that V for Wiki was chosen as one of Apple’s Best of 2016 apps. V for Wiki is one of the best-looking Wikipedia apps on iOS. The app has a four-tab interface with a search box that is always available at the top of the main interface. The first tab features an assortment of Wikipedia articles in a two column grid. There are also search history and bookmark tabs. However, my favorite aspect of V for Wiki is its location tab. The app marks locations around you that have Wikipedia entries with colorful markers that have lines that gracefully curve from the markers to a row of article entries that scroll horizontally across the bottom of the screen. The design is attractive, but also functional, making V for Wiki one of my favorite ways to explore what is around me when I travel.


Wonder

Wonder is an excellent no-nonsense research solution with an interface reminiscent of a web browser. The ever-present search bar along the top of the screen and fast performance put Wonder’s focus squarely on Wikipedia’s content. The final tab along the bottom of the main screen opens up a unique tab view where you can save search results as cards for future reference. You can read our full review of Wonder here.


Inquire

We reviewed Inquire (formally called Curiosity) last year. There are three ways to browse Wikipedia with Inquire. The first is location-based. Like V for Wiki, Inquire places markers on a map for nearby Wikipedia entries. Tapping on a point of interest opens the related article. Inquire also includes Popular and Explore sections. With Popular you can see what is trending on Wikipedia today or this week, for example. The Explore tab includes curated collections of articles covering a topical subject or broad category like ‘inventors,’ The final tab is the ‘You’ tab that collects your Wikipedia search history and bookmarks.

TIPS

Tips and tricks to master your apps and be more productive.

Skipping Unskippable YouTube Ads

YouTube videos start with unskippable ads more often than not. However, with the new MacBook Pro, you can skip those pesky ads. The process is simple. Any time a YouTube video plays in Safari on the new MacBook Pro, a scrub bar appears in the Touch Bar regardless of whether the video is an ad. Just scrub quickly to the end of the ad to skip it and move on to the main video.

SHORTCUTS CORNER

Get help and suggestions for your iOS shortcuts and productivity apps.

Shortcuts Essentials

Saving Emails from Airmail as Tasks in Todoist

Among the new features in Airmail 1.5 (which I detailed on MacStories earlier this week), there is a new integration to add a Workflow step to any custom action. This new Workflow action makes it possible to share details of email messages – including body text and a callback URL – with an existing workflow, which will parse the data received from Airmail as input.

To give you an example of what this powerful integration can let you build using Airmail and Workflow, I created a custom action to turn email messages into Todoist tasks with rich cards that embed message-specific details as well as a link to re-open the message in Airmail even after it’s been archived.

The new ‘Send to Workflow’ action in Airmail works by letting you choose which parts of a message you want to pass to a workflow as text. Under the hood, these bits of text are encoded in a URL scheme that launches Workflow and triggers a specific workflow to be run. However, because there’s a user interface to build custom actions in Airmail, you never see the underlying URL scheme and you don’t have to take care of encoding text yourself; you just flip some switches to tell Airmail which details of a message to share with Workflow.

By default, different bits of a message are sent to Workflow with a newline as the separator. To have more control over automation and more precisely organize the bits of text generated by Airmail, you can define a custom separator that will be placed in between items. I recommend doing this if you don’t want to split text at newlines and want to automate messages that span multiple paragraphs.

For my custom Todoist action, I wanted to be able to save emails as tasks that contained the subject, the sender’s name and email address, and a preview of the body text. I also wanted a way to quickly re-open the message from Todoist without having to snooze it in Airmail or keep it pinned in my inbox. With custom actions in Airmail 1.5, all of this is fairly easy to assemble.

After selecting the portions of a message I needed in Airmail, I created a workflow with ‘Split Text’ as the first action and put the custom separator I entered in Airmail in the dedicated field. With the custom separator, Workflow will keep new lines and will instead split the text into multiple items every time the custom separator occurs in the text shared by Airmail. This way, the workflow turns the incoming URL scheme from Airmail into a list of text items that always have the same index position.

For example, the sender’s email will always be at Index 1 in the list, while the subject line will be at Index 3. Workflow makes it easy to extract items from a list at a specific index: all we need to do is save the list to a variable then iterate over it with a ‘Get Item from List’ action, save the result to a separate sub-variable, and repeat the process for every message parameter shared by Airmail.

At the end, it’s all a matter of filling Workflow’s ‘Add Todoist Item’ action with variables previously extracted from the email message. In my case, I used the subject and message link with a Markdown syntax to make the task’s title tappable in Todoist (tapping it will open the message directly in Airmail so I can read it again and reply to it), while everything else (sender details and body text) goes into the note field of the task. The date, as you can imagine, gets typed into a native ‘Date’ action in Workflow, which supports natural language input and gets automatically translated to the format that the Todoist API requires.

Thanks to this custom action, every time I come across a message in Airmail I want to save for later, I tap a button (or swipe the message) and Workflow launches with a text field that asks me to enter a due date. That’s it. I don’t have to confirm any other message detail and I don’t have to interact with a Todoist task entry interface; Workflow can parse message data sent by Airmail and talk to the Todoist API to save a task.

A rich task created in Todoist by Workflow thanks to Airmail’s custom action.

This has become my favorite way to turn email messages into tasks, which lets me process my inbox more easily and retain information about original messages in the body of a task.

You can get the workflow here (for the Airmail custom action, you’ll have to recreate it manually based on my screenshots).

Convert Mail Rich Text to Markdown

Here’s a simple workflow I had to put together this week for a basic task that isn’t natively supported on iOS. This week’s Home screen guest, James Thomson, sent me his post as rich text over email. Rich text is notoriously flaky on iOS (multiple apps have different implementations of the framework), and I wanted to convert everything to Markdown while keeping James’ formatting and links intact without having to re-add them manually.

Thankfully, Workflow comes with a built-in action to convert rich text to Markdown. To turn James’ post into plain text, I had to copy rich text from Mail (one of the apps that keeps formatting when copying rich text to paste it somewhere else), then use ‘Get Clipboard-Make Markdown from Rich Text’ in Workflow to get the previously copied rich text, convert it, and save it as output.

This way, I didn’t lose any formatting from the original piece and I was able to import it into Ulysses with Workflow’s own ‘New Ulysses Sheet’ action, which accepts Markdown input to create a new document in the text editor.

You can get the workflow here.

Submit a Shortcut Request

SHORTCUTS CORNER

Get help and suggestions for your iOS shortcuts and productivity apps.

Member Requests

Question: I recently started using DEVONthink. My current workflow is to scan with my iPhone or ScanSnap to Dropbox, then, when I have time, I rename the file and import to DEVONthink on iOS. After that, I manually delete the file in Dropbox. I’m looking for a way to automate this so I don’t have to take so many manual steps. (Adrian, @therealizzy)

It sounds like you should consider an integrated solution to save some time during the scanning and renaming steps. As long as you keep scanning independent from renaming a file, I don’t see how we could speed up the process through automation. Instead, I would suggest using a scanner app that lets you rename a file quickly as soon as the picture is taken and while the document is uploading. Scanbot is a great choice for this as it lets you rename documents easily and it comes with automatic uploads to copy a file to a cloud service right after a document has been generated.

Faster scanning and renaming, however, still wouldn’t provide a solution to the problem of importing a file into DEVONthink and deleting the original from Dropbox. You’re still going to have to manually delete and import the file into DEVONthink, but we can automate at least one part of this process.

By combining the ‘Get Files from Dropbox’ and ‘Delete Files from Dropbox’ actions in a workflow, you should be able to fetch an existing file from Dropbox, save it to a variable, delete the file, and import it into DEVONthink using the Open In menu of iOS. This way, you’ll have to choose a file manually from the Dropbox picker in Workflow, but you’ll save time in the deleting and importing steps.

Question: Most modern mail clients have snoozing of emails, and I’m looking for the same with my RSS articles. I don’t know of any clients that supports this. Is this something I could do in Workflow or do you know of any system that could give me RSS snoozing? (Adam Andries)

I am not aware of RSS apps with email-like snoozing features, but we can get creative with Workflow and put together a system that uses the action extension and Reminders to schedule an article for later.

Here’s my idea: from an RSS reader, we can share the URL to a story with the Workflow extension, which will get the URL, the title of the story, save both to two variables, and bring up a Reminders action. With Workflow’s native support for natural language input in dates, we can schedule a reminder containing the link to the story we want to read later using a simple syntax such as “today at 5 PM”. Workflow will then save the reminder, which will propagate to other devices signed into the same iCloud account in the background.

At due time, iOS will bring up a notification for the reminder, which we can open to find the article’s link in the note field and tap it to view it in Safari.

It would have been nice if Workflow supported a “Schedule Notification” action to save a local notification with a user-defined payload for later (imagine saving a link that gets turned into a rich article preview by Workflow), but this workaround based on Reminders gets the job done. If you want an easier way to open the URL from the notification itself, you could also consider Due and its excellent Workflow integration.

You can get the workflow here.

Question: I want to copy a small section of text (Fact of the Day) from a daily email that I receive, and then append this to a flagged Draft document to build one long continuous document of daily facts.

To distinguish between each fact, I want to insert that day’s date above the text I have copied to my clipboard. I came across Federico’s workflow to append text to the clipboard – but I want to add the date first, i.e. prepend it – and then send it to my Drafts document. I cannot seem to find a way to do this. (Neal, @e_profundity)

This can be done with a workflow that saves the contents of the clipboard to a variable as soon as it starts running and then fetches and reformats the current date.

Here’s the trick: we can’t directly inject content into the clipboard, which means we have to fetch the clipboard, save it as a variable, put together some new text, and then re-save it as an altered version to the clipboard. In this case, after saving the clipboard to a variable and using ‘Date-Format Date’ to extract the current date, we can use a ‘Text’ action to put the date above the Clipboard variable and then use ‘Copy to Clipboard’ again to end up with a date string prepended to the Fact of the Day, ready to be pasted in Drafts.

You can get the workflow here.

Submit a Workflow Request

Submit a Shortcut Request

WEEKLY Q&A

Your weekly correspondence with the MacStories team.

Question: Why do you and some other writers prefer a monospaced font? (Ben Smith, @benfsmith)

This is a matter of personal taste, but I feel like monospaced fonts make it easier for me to edit long documents and spot typos. I fell in love with Nitti when it was added to iA Writer several years ago, and last year I finally caved, bought the entire family, and installed it as a custom font in Ulysses.

I use monospace fonts primarily because I find them easier to read on a screen while I’m writing.

Question: Is there a way to search the Club MacStories archive? (Terrance, @holmete)

There isn’t yet, but this is part of my big goals for 2017 – to build an entire service around the Club MacStories archive. It’s going to take a while, and we don’t have a release date planned yet.

It’s not ideal, but I’ve been using PDF copies of our newsletters archived in DEVONthink for iOS to look for content we previously shared with members. DEVONthink has excellent document searching capabilities with advanced operators that make it easy to build precise search queries.

Question: I’m looking to go all-in with iOS. I know Federico prefers the 12.9" iPad, but I think he never mentioned what storage size he would recommend. I’m all right with 64 GB on my iPhone. Should I get a 256 GB iPad, or is it overkill? What is your opinion on that? (Olivier Sylvestre, @oliversyl)

Personally, I like buying high-end models for everything (I have 256 GB versions of the iPhone 7 Plus and 12.9-inch iPad Pro) because I like to keep games, TV shows, music, and photos always available offline. However, I realize that such solution is expensive and overkill for many. If you plan on using the iPad Pro as a primary computer but don’t need the extra storage of the 256 GB version, I think a 128 GB model would be perfect for you.

That’s a hard question that depends on what you are going to use your iPad for. I find my iPhone fills up a little faster than my iPad, in part because I’m a podcast hoarder who never gets through them all. Also, although I don’t download a lot of videos or keep very many large games on my iPad, I do keep about 14 GB of WWDC videos on it. As a result, the amount of space used is similar on both devices, but a little greater on my iPhone. My iPad Pro has about 15 GB of its 128 GB free and 310 apps on it. In contrast, my iPhone has 448 apps on it and I’ve used about 123 of 256 GB.

Take a look at how you use your iPhone and try to figure out how you expect to use the iPad. If there’s a difference that requires larger apps or files, you should consider stepping up to a larger iPad model, though I suspect that most people who can comfortably use a 64 GB iPhone would not need a 256 GB iPad.

Question: How do you create the Table of Contents for your longform posts? Ulysses doesn’t do that, right? (Ben Smith, @benfsmith)

Our Table of Contents (for both regular stories and the special layout we used on my iOS 10 review and iPad Pro story) is a custom implementation our web developer built specifically for MacStories. It’s based on WordPress and it allows me to enter a shortcode in a Markdown draft, which gets converted to a dynamic Table of Contents on the website.

Question: I have struggled with finding a great way to consume articles and news for a while now. I keep switching between different RSS clients and Nuzzel. In your top apps of 2016 article, you mentioned Nuzzel, Inoreader and Fiery Feeds, and Pocket/Todoist. I was curious what your workflow is for this. What types of articles go in what service? How often do you check each one? (Craig McClellan, @craigmcclellan)

Inoreader is my RSS service, which I use (through Fiery Feeds) to view a stream of all posts from blogs I subscribe to. Sometimes these stories become articles in my read-later queue; other times, they are assigned to the MacStories team as news to be covered on the site or linked posts.

Pocket is where I save things to read for later. As part of my annual new-year experiments, I am playing around with Safari Reading List again, but I’m not sure I will be switching from Pocket just yet. Regardless, I’m always going to be needing a place where I can temporarily store articles I haven’t read yet. Todoist is my task manager and it has nothing to do with articles and consuming news.

Finally, I use Nuzzel a couple of times a day to see what people I follow on Twitter have been sharing. Nuzzel is a great way to “stay in the loop” without spending too much time scrolling my Twitter timeline.

Question: I’ve been using Workflow since it was released but I find it difficult to manage a large number of workflows due to the lack of a way to organize them (folders?). Yes, there are colors and icons, but I haven’t yet found a process to organize workflows with those. Considering how you have a lot more workflows than I, do you have any suggestions on how I can find what I need more quickly? (Matteo Cappadonna, @mcappadonna)

I struggle with this, too. I don’t think I can call it “a system”, but I’ve been doing two things to visually differentiate workflows: processor-type workflows that are executed without user interaction are gray; everything else is colored based on the app/service it integrates with (blue for Dropbox, pink for Pocket, orange for RSS, etc.). However, I would very much like the ability to organize workflows with folders – I’m hoping this option will be added in 2017.

Some sort of folder structure in Workflow would be nice. I currently have mine organized roughly by how often I use them and color. I have a few green ones on top that are general purpose workflows that I use with the Today widget and I want at the top of the widget screen. The next set is all red MacStories workflows for doing things like uploading images to our CMS and sending app links to Trello. The third group is yellow and are specific to Club MacStories. They help me do things like create the app icons you seen throughout the newsletter and quickly crop sticker screenshots. After that are a couple more MacStories workflows I only use for quarterly earnings calls. The rest is a bit of a mess and includes workflows I’m experimenting with and ones that don’t fit neatly into any other category.

Submit your own question

THE ALBUM

We love stickers in iMessage, and here we'll share some of our favorites.

Aminal Stickers

Over 120 charming animals including cats, corgis, sloths, unicorns, and koalas. Some of these stickers are animated, and there’s also a separate Winter category for holiday-themed variations.

Pokémon Chat Pals

Another sticker pack from The Pokémon Company, this time featuring Pokémon from Sun and Moon as well as Pickachu and other familiar creatures. The majestic Alolan Dugtrio is also available in this pack.

Gelly - funny jellyfish stickers

Ever wished you could liven up conversations with your friends on iMessage with some jellyfish? Well, now you can. This pack features multiple types of colored jellyfish in various contexts, which include hugging, partying, and sleeping.

Chill In 2017

Deanna Metcalf’s Drama Llama is back to tell us that we should chill more in 2017 so we can start the new year in a better way. I am not sure how to best describe these stickers – they’re my favorite kind of nonsense.

Yumsty

Yumsty is a unique food app. The free version comes with ingredients to build a ham sandwich. With In-App Purchases you can add Christmas treats, Italian foods, American foods, and Drink sticker packs.

Lemon Lumberjack

Lemon Lumberjack is an app that teaches kids the alphabet. These stickers of cheerful foods and other objects dressed in costumes are drawn from that app but are fun for all ages.

Animated Buffalo Emoji

These animated cyclops buffalo emoji are wonderful. There’s so much emotion communicated in such a small weird package.

CaffeineDoodles

These hand drawn face doodles are some of the most expressive I’ve seen. I particularly like the displeased and side-eye faces.

Ink Vibes

Ink Vibes have a cool wood-cut print vibe and features classic objects overlaid with fun messages.

Shake Shack

These green neon Shake Shack stickers are a great way to entice your friends out for a burger and shake. And that little penguin guy is too cute.

APP DEBUTS

Noteworthy new app releases and updates, handpicked by the MacStories team.

Pixel Paint: 8bit art + photos

Pixel Paint is a new 8-bit paint app for iOS that lets you shoot photos in retro camera modes as well as draw pixels, apply dithering effects, and more. There’s a full image editor built into the app, which also offers iCloud sync, a customizable color palette, and multitouch gestures.


Floradora

If you use your email inbox to capture reminders and tasks by sending yourself messages, Floradora is something you should check out. When the icon of this Mac menu bar app is clicked, it opens a text box into which you can type a reminder or to-do item that is sent to your inbox via email with a click of the send button.


Pic Scanner Gold

Pic Scanner Gold is a robust photo scanning app for iOS that lets you scan multiple photos at once, edit them, and create cards, slideshows, and other items. The app also features a rich set of sharing options to services like Facebook, Instagram, Whats App, Twitter, and others.


Expressions

Expressions is a simple Mac app for testing regular expressions. First, type your regex in the top half of the window. Then, type some text in the bottom half of the window. The portions of the text that are matched by your regex will be highlighted. The app is a handy way quickly test regular expressions you want to use in code, scripts, or workflows.


Outlinely

Outlinely started on the Mac but was recently introduced on iOS. The app is a full-featured outliner with support for Markdown syntax, OPML export, themes, and organizing your outlines into folders. The app is free, but a ‘pro’ subscription adds syncing among iOS devices and the Mac version of the app and full-text search. Outlinely reminds me a little of Bear, although it cannot handle photos.


Magic

Magic is similar to Snapchat lenses. It uses the selfie camera on your iPhone and adds effects like hearts coming out of your eyes or tears streaming down your face. The resulting video clip can be shared on several social networks or using Magic’s iMessage app.


Streaks Workout

Streaks Workout includes 18 exercises that don’t require any equipment. Version 2.0 adds Apple Watch and iPad support, iCloud sync, and custom workouts built from any combination of the exercises in the app. I particularly like the Apple Watch support, which tracks your heart rate while you exercise and allows you to mark workouts as completed, and the iPad app, which makes viewing your next exercise from a distance easier.


GIPHY CAM

GIPHY CAM got a nice update right after the new year. Now you can open GIPHY CAM from inside iMessage, making it fast to record a quick GIF and send it to a friend. The latest update also adds Snapchat-style face-tracing overlays, stickers, and new filters.


TypiMage

TypiMage got a redesign over the winter holidays. The app lets you add text to photographs and then tweak the text in a wide variety of ways. You can change the typography, color, size, add effects, and even rotate text.


Pastebot

Pastebot from Tapbots is a fantastic clipboard manager for the Mac that I reviewed late last year. Tapbots has been hard at work since Pastebot’s release in December and this week added a filter to the app’s filter library that lets you trigger shell scripts that run on your clippings and open up interesting automation possibilities for power users.


Command-Tab Plus

Command-Tab Plus takes the familiar Mac keyboard shortcut for switching among windows and adds some handy features. The app numbers the icons displayed when you type Command-Tab allowing you to type the number assigned to the icon instead of repeatedly typing Command-Tab to get to the app you want. You can also hide inactive apps, only show apps open on a particular macOS Space or display, change the keyboard combination that triggers the app, and customize the utility’s interface.

HOME SCREENS

Friends of MacStories share their iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch Home screens.

James Thomson

Twitter: @jamesthomson. Creator of PCalc and DragThing.

The hardest part of this was deciding which wallpaper to use for the screenshot.

I don’t exactly have a minimalist setup. Since I was made a member of Plus Club earlier in the year against my will (I needed to track down a PCalc bug that only occurred on the 7 Plus), I’ve kept my frequently used apps at the bottom of the screen within easy reach, with a variety of folders at the top. I actually adapted to the bigger phone pretty quickly, and I might be forced to admit that Myke was…not wrong.

Social

The usual collection of social network and messaging apps. I use Tweetbot on the Mac, and have it installed on the phone too, but I usually use Twitterrific for its unified timeline. I recently installed secure messaging app Signal in response to the changing political situation in the US and Europe – well, you never know. I don’t actually use Snapchat, but the kids tell me it’s cool so I keep it installed. Also WhatsApp, Skype, Viber, Slack, Steam, and Find My Friends.

Shopping

I use Amazon to sanity-check prices when I’m out and about. I’ve never used Prime Now, but have it just in case I need some emergency supplies. Three is the customer app for my phone network in the UK. Cineworld is the booking app for the cinema chain I frequent, and Meerkat Movies is an animal-themed two-for-one cinema ticket app. Also eBay, PayPal, Apple Store, and Kickstarter.

Utilities

Since this is Scotland, I have three different weather apps installed for when I want a second opinion on how much it’s going to rain – Dark Sky, BBC Weather, and Apple’s own Weather app. There’s Speedtest for testing network speeds, and Geekbench for testing phone processor speeds. Also Clock, 1Password, Launch Center Pro, Workflow.

Reference

A variety of reference tools. Even though the iPhone has pretty decent built-in facilities nowadays, the Chambers Dictionary and Chambers Thesaurus apps have been kept up-to-date and I like having them as standalone apps. The most-frequently used app is likely IMDB. I do like V for Wikipedia, although I tend to just use Safari directly. Also Oxford Dictionary of English, Google Translate, Google, iTunes U, WWDC.

Audio

I’ve probably spent more on synthesisers than all other iOS apps combined. I would not consider myself an actual musician, but I like messing around with them, and it’s a lot more compact than keeping physical keyboards. Korg Gadget is a brilliant sequencer app with a wide variety of synths. If you buy the standalone Korg iWAVESTATION or Korg ODYSSEi instruments, they are also unlocked inside Gadget. Just Press Record is a useful sound recording app, also made in Scotland. modizer is a player for retro computer and console music files – it emulates the sound chips from the Commodore 64 onwards. Also GarageBand, Shazam, TuneIn Radio Pro.

Video

Various video players, including the on-demand TV services in the UK of BBC iPlayer, ITV Hub, All 4, and My5. Also YouTube, Vimeo, Netflix, VLC, Twitch.

Remotes

Apps for talking to other devices – iTunes Remote, UE BOOM for controlling the superb UE BOOM 2 Bluetooth speaker I got for Christmas, Kodi Remote, PlayStation, Screens, Remoter VNC, and Apple Watch.

Health

I have a Fitbit scale, which doesn’t sync to HealthKit. So I have a separate app, Data Manager for Fitbit that transfers the data over. Also Activity, Health, HeartWatch, Activity++, and MyPlate. I’m going to make an effort this year to use all this technology I have at my disposal to improve my health.

Main Apps

Nothing too surprising here. I generally use the stock Apple apps, but I still find Google Maps to be better for transit directions, and Apple only recent started supporting transit data in Glasgow. BuzzFeed News is a nice focused summary of major news stories for the day that I can look through in minutes.

Also Safari, Mail, Twitterrific, Facebook Messenger, Calendar, Contacts, Facebook, Wallet, Camera (I do also use Obscura, which is in the photo category on page two – Hi Ben!), Photos, FaceTime, Podcasts, Music, and the source of everything, the App Store.

Dock

Well, of course I was going to have PCalc in my dock! But I like to have it easily accessible while I’m developing.

And that’s it! Well, apart from page two…

Submit your own Home Screen